A model OA journal publication agreement
February 19th, 2014
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| …decided to write my own… |
In a previous post, I proposed that open-access journals use the CC-BY license for their scholar-contributed articles:
As long as you’re founding a new journal, its contents should be as open as possible consistent with appropriate attribution. That exactly characterizes the CC-BY license. It’s also a tremendously simple approach. Once the author grants a CC-BY license, no further rights need be granted to the publisher. There’s no need for talk about granting the publisher a nonexclusive license to publish the article, etc., etc. The CC-BY license already allows the publisher to do so. There’s no need to talk about what rights the author retains, since the author retains all rights subject to the nonexclusive CC-BY license. I’ve made the case for a CC-BY license at length elsewhere.
Recently, a journal asked me how to go about doing just that. What should their publication agreement look like? It was a fair question, and one I didn’t have a ready answer for. The “Online Guide to Open Access Journals Publishing” provides a template agreement that is refreshingly minimalist, but by my lights misses some important aspects. I looked around at various journals to see what they did, but didn’t find any agreements that seemed ideal either. So I decided to write my own. Herewith is my proposal for a model OA publication agreement. Read the rest of this entry »